Penny Russell recalls editing the travel diary of Jane Lady Franklin, a nineteenth-century Lieutenant Governor’s wife In April 1839, an English lady set off on an extraordinary adventure. Crossing the sea from Van Diemen’s Land, where her husband was Lieutenant Governor, Jane Lady Franklin travelled overland to Sydney from the tiny new settlement at Port Phillip. She travelled slowly and in style over rutted, poorly made roads—with a heavy baggage dray and a light cart, three gentlemen attending on horseback, her niece as companion, two mounted police escorts, her coachman and personal servants and a mountain of baggage, including an iron bedstead. Accommodation was rough and ready. For a week she and her niece slept in a tent, while the ‘gents’ rigged a tarpaulin and the servants sought shelter under the cart. For several days, when supplies ran low, the party feasted on curried swan, shot en route. Where houses or hostels did exist, they were infested with fleas and mosquitoes, and Lady Franklin yearned for the freedoms of her tent life. By day she jolted in the cart or sat, with greater comfort, beside the coachman on the box. Sometimes she rode a pony equipped with a lady’s saddle; occasionally she walked. The journey from Melbourne to Sydney took six weeks to accomplish.
As she travelled, her eyes, ears and pen were busy. If she had any justification for this trip, it was that she was gathering information for her husband about the crops and livestock, schools and churches, convicts and settlers of this neighbouring colony. In any case, she had been an indefatigable diarist, as well as traveller, since her teens. In the basement of a friend’s home in London lay boxes of her diaries, recording early excursions around the south of England, through Wales, across France, Switzerland, Italy, in Germany and Holland and, later, in the company of her husband, through the countries of the Mediterranean. Movement was essential to her restless spirit; travel temporarily satisfied an insatiable curiosity. And writing, with her, was a habit—if not, indeed, a compulsion. If the ruins of classical civilisation were now beyond her reach, she must content herself with slab huts and dairies.
She wrote, this time, in a tiny hand-stitched notebook. When the pages ran out, she made new ones by cutting up old letters and drafts. Pages of her travel diary are crossed with broken salutations and signatures, now severed from the context in which they were first created, conveying tantalising glimpses of otherwise unrecorded events. Her travel diary filled those makeshift pages with a cramped but surprisingly legible script. When she encountered such odd scraps of information as her eclectic mind delighted in, she recorded them on a separate page of jotted notes at the end of the notebook. When she had to create new pages, the narrative of the travel diary itself would simply flow around those notes, to recommence on the other side. ‘From 17 pages back’ she would write helpfully on the top of the new page, and continue her flow of thoughts and observations uninterrupted. The diary she thus produced, now held in the National Library, sketches a complex portrait of the inhabitants of the remote districts of New South Wales in 1839: the squatters and their wives, the workers and servants they employed, the publicans and storekeepers, the police magistrates, bushrangers and clergy, and the Aborigines, some accepting dependence and cultural dislocation as the price of survival on pastoral stations, others still fighting to protect their traditional livelihood. Her accounts of minute alterations in the passing landscape jostle with details of crops, mail deliveries, passing travellers, building materials and business ventures, and with stories of the ‘blacks’ told in hushed tones around the campfire. Her descriptions capture the hopes and fears, anxieties and drudgeries of white men and women who dwelt in makeshift settlements, far from home, friends, and all the imagined bliss and vice of civilisation.
Upon her arrival at Sydney, Lady Franklin was installed at Government House, the honoured guest of Sir George Gipps. She visited fancy fairs, exhibitions, dinner parties and balls, dropped in on the police court, attended the Opening of Parliament, and paid and received innumerable calls. But her attention to her diary continued unchecked. Again, the preponderant theme is physical description, and the diary brings to life the bustle of building and planning in this still sparsely settled town: the churches, shops, hospitals, and schools, the lighthouse at South Head, the grand houses of Tempe and Elizabeth Bay—and, at the other extreme, the bleak facade of the Benevolent Institution, or the grim Female Factory at Parramatta, where the women ate food straight from the table, ‘exactly like brutes’. Although she had assured her husband that she would not stay long in Sydney, it was two full months after her arrival before she embarked in a tiny sailing ship for a stormy passage to Hobart Town. Meanwhile she had enjoyed two further excursions, to the Hunter Valley and the Hawkesbury region, which had filled many more pages of her notebook with details of colonial networks and industry. The decision of the National Library to publish this diary is merited by the historical value of the work. It is a uniquely detailed account of rural and urban life in New South Wales in 1839. It has been plundered by many historians for its comments on individuals, organisations, education, science, architecture and art. It is, indeed, difficult to think of an aspect of colonial life to which Lady Franklin did not make some reference in the course of her travels. But when I took on the task of editing the diary for publication, I realised the dimensions of the challenges it presents. The plethora of detail, however it may delight a specialist, does not make Jane Franklin’s diary a joy to read in its totality. To make the diary a book, I had not simply to reproduce its character as an exhaustive travel chronicle, but to bring to the centre of the text a different and more elusive voice: those moments of writing and being that express the personality of Jane Franklin herself.
In a diary so firmly focused on the external world, such occasions are rare. Her opinions, thoughts, and personality must be deduced as much from what is unwritten as from what is written—her character sketched in the space left vacant in her accounts. And yet her ‘self’ emerges from these pages, fragmented, elusive but surprisingly tangible amongst the preoccupation with what lay before her eyes. Her enthusiasm is apparent in the sheer volume of her writing; the eclecticism of her interests is revealed in its minute detail; her flattering curiosity evidently sparked voluble communications from experts in all fields. She reveals herself, too, through accounts of her exchanges with individuals—her sense of affront when presented with an extortionate bill, her high-handed disposition of her servants, her profound sense of social obligation and responsibility, her frequent agonies of self-consciousness in a fraught social world. Such vignettes fleetingly centre her self at the heart of her own dramatic existence. And they become more frequent as the diary progresses. As the trip extended itself indefinitely, the diary, while never losing its character as a notebook of information, assumed the role of confidant. Just occasionally, Jane Franklin found space for personal anecdote and even for personal feeling. But what shines most palpably through her writing is her passionate attachment to her imperial world. It was a world that sparkled with the enticements of new discoveries and new knowledge, and offered boundless promise for future progress as the reward for enlightened and conscientious effort. Equally, and paradoxically, it was a world bounded by rules and conventions, hypocrisies and inequalities which sought forcibly to delimit its participants and beneficiaries. Jane Franklin was produced and constrained by the age she lived in—an age that regarded a woman who travelled, read and wrote as inherently transgressive. For that very reason, her notes could not in her own day be transformed into literature. The bare suggestion that she was writing a book sent colonists into paroxysms of mirth, tinged with unease. Their mockery makes it clear why few women ventured into print, and why Jane Franklin herself shrank from any suggestion that she might publish her diaries. Her curiosity, though typical of her day and age, could have no legitimate expression, simply because it was the curiosity of a woman.
Today, Jane Franklin continues to fascinate because of her passion for observation, her thirst for detail, her unwearied pen. But it is not always easy to like her. Compounded in equal parts of forthrightness and lack of confidence, of sympathetic curiosity about her fellow human beings and bourgeois indifference to their circumstances, of imperial complacency and female self-effacement, she invites as much cynicism as admiration. Yet her determination to throw herself into unlikely situations while maintaining a modest, unassuming demeanor drives and enlivens her diaries. Perverse, complacent, delightful and infuriating, her personality may irritate and attract readers of her Port Phillip diary as forcefully as it did colonial residents when she wound her way northward to Sydney, more than 160 years ago. PENNY RUSSELL is an historian at the University of Sydney. She is the editor of This Errant Lady: Jane Franklin’s Overland Journey to Port Phillip and Sydney, 1839 which will be released by the National Library this month |
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